The Portland International Film Festival: PIFF sets sail on opening weekend

Each February, Portlanders can be relied upon to prove a few things: the sight of the sun isn’t necessary to maintain civilized life on Earth; short pants are, indeed, all-weather wear; the human body can, with practice, achieve a perfect equilibrium between beer and coffee; and the love of foreign film runs deep and true and fervid in this town.

"Terribly Happy"In the next three weeks, thousands of movie lovers will turn out, as they have for decades, for the Portland International Film Festival, the annual core sample of what’s happening in world cinema as seen from right here in our own grey, wet, wintery burg.

This year’s edition, the 33rd, collects 77 feature films and 39 shorts from 43 countries, including four Oscar nominees and perhaps a half-dozen hotly-awaited new titles. Dramas, comedies, slices-of-life, thrillers, documentaries, animation, family fare, even a sizeable collection of short films by local artists: it’s all here, all in a busy, buzzy package that, for the better part of a month, makes a corner of downtown feel like festival time in Toronto or Park City or (and you have to squint more than a little to achieve this effect) Cannes.

Previous PIFFs have sometimes felt like hall of fame ceremonies, with new works by storied international directors being dutifully trotted out. And while there are, indeed, films by some undisputed masters in the mix this year (including Alain Resnais, Peter Greenaway, Chen Kaige, Marco Bellocchio, and André Téchiné), the passing of the torch to a new generation can be felt in the prominence of works by such established younger stars as Jacques Audiard, Catherine Breillat, Jan Hrebejk, Bong Joon-Ho and Michael Winterbottom. And there are 15 films by debuting directors, one or two of whom might -- might -- still be working productively behind the camera in his or her 80s like the great Monsieur Resnais.

"I Am Love"As ever, PIFF offers a chance for serendipity, pleasure, wonderment, panic, frustration and glory. In a town blessed with far more year-round moviegoing options than its size strictly merits, it remains the gold standard of festivals -- well-attended, catholically programmed, balanced between familiar and daring, and, blessedly, shining the light of art during a time of year that can be oppressively dim.

Some of the films in the schedule will be back for commercial theatrical runs later in the year, but simply scratching movies off your to-see list is hardly the point of PIFF. The communal experience of seeing a movie in a theater is amplified by a film festival, and PIFF has proven itself time and again to be the city’s foremost opportunity to see quality work early and in an atmosphere of intense appreciation.

The 33rd Portland International Film Festival

When: February 11-28

Where: various locations including the Whitsell Auditorium of the Portland Art Museum and the Regal Broadway Metroplex

Set among the cultured classes and pristine villas of modern-day Milan, “I Am Love” feels much like a transported melodrama from the mind of Douglas Sirk.

It begins with a birthday party for the aging patriarch of the Recchi clan, who appoints his eldest son Tancredi and his grandson Edoardo as joint successors to the family’s industrialist empire. This is less a tale of corporate oedipal rivalry, though, than one of repressed and rediscovered passion, namely that of Emma (Tilda Swinton), Tancredi’s enigmatic Russian-born wife. Her clandestine hillside liaisons with an earthy chef, though, feel like warmed-over outtakes from “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”

If we have learned anything from the new wave of Romanian film, it’s that certain vital things in that benighted land are done systematically, ruthlessly, dispassionately.

In this deliberate and doomy movie from Corneliu Porumboiu (“12:08 East of Bucharest”), a policeman (Dragos Bucur) spends more than a week reluctantly building a case about the most trivial crime -- three kids smoking a little hash -- and trying to evade the insistence of his superiors to arrest and crush the perpetrators. At the same time, he receives lessons in minute details of his own language from his schoolteacher wife and a superior officer, and that rule-bound activity informs his police work.

For all the inactivity and resistance that mark the plot, there’s beauty in the filmmaking and a kind of dazzling inevitability to the unwinding of the tale. Oh, and while it’s not exactly “Midnight Express,” it will encourage you to stick to beer and wine while touring Transylvania.

B; Romania; 113 min. (6:30 p.m. Saturday, Whitsell) -- Shawn Levy

“Terribly Happy”

The pitch for this noirish comedy might call it a Coen brothers-style modern western about a new sheriff arriving in a dirty town in a remote corner of Denmark. And that would be both accurate and complimentary.

Director and co-writer Henrik Ruben Genz marshals dry wit, genuine suspense and an oppressive sense of gloom and mystery to tell the tale of an emotionally unstable Copenhagen cop (Jakob Cedergren) sent to get his head together in a town where things as big as cows can disappear in bogs and a local bully (Kim Bodnia) and his oversexed wife (Lene Maria Christensen) rule with a reign of fear. Or, rather, they seem to: the locals, you see, have ways and rites at hand to ensure that things stay as they like them.

Inventive, droll and sharp, the film is rich in comic darkness but quite humane and genuine as well. An American remake is said to be in the works; see the original before someone lesser than Genz -- or the Coens -- gets their mitts on it.

Ulrich Tukur (“The Lives of Others”) takes the title role as a German factory supervisor who led the effort to save upwards of 200,000 Chinese lives during the horrific 1937 Rape of Nanking by the Japanese Army. Rabe ran the Siemens power plant in the city, and, spurred by the idealism of a French schoolteacher (Anne Consigny) and the cynicism of an American doctor (Steve Buscemi), helped create the Security Zone where countless civilians sought safe harbor.

The Schindler-esque tale features high production values, but, Rabe’s heroism notwithstanding, indulges far too often in Hollywood-style melodramatic peaks which lack the ring of specific truth. Still, it’s an obscure bit of history which deserves as much light as it can get.

“Hipster style conquers all fear!” proclaims a lyric from the closing number of this Russian musical (yes, that’s right, Russian musical) set in a version of 1955 Moscow where a colorful subculture of underground boogie-woogie clubs and reckless individuality thrives.

Mels (Anton Shagin) is part of the local Party-authorized fun police, who go around cutting off skinny ties and pompadours. When he meets hipster Polly (Oksana Akinshina), though, it’s not long before Mels is grooving to samizdat jazz LPs made from surplus x-ray film and scoring his own black-market saxophone.

“Hipsters” is directed with narrative economy and visual energy, which eventually give way to an overlong third act. Still, “kowtowing to Western ideology,” as the Soviet authorities put it, has never looked like so much fun.B-plus; Russia; 125 min. (8:45 p.m. Friday, Broadway; 5:30 p.m. Saturday, Broadway; 8:15 p.m. Tuesday, Broadway; 7:00 p.m. Wednesday, Broadway) – MM“The Art of the Steal"

How is a price put on “priceless” art? Should a dead man be entitled to forever dictate the terms of the public’s access to his collection? The only blemishes on Don Argott’s intriguing, even exciting documentary is that these essential questions are not fully pondered.

“Steal” uncovers decades-long machinations, considered by many a brazen act of theft, to circumvent a will and control a staggering bevy of impressionist, post-impressionist and early modern paintings acquired by Dr. Albert Barnes (who died 1951) and housed in a Philadelphia suburb, away from the city’s covetous high-rollers with whom Barnes had forged a mutual loathing. The villains are numerous, some well-known — two charitable foundations that fund National Public Radio come off as duplicitous and, shall we say, uncharitable.

Asghar Farhadi’s beguiling film strikingly contrasts a strain of modernity in Iranian life with the attitudes and morals of orthodoxy, all within the contours of a heated mystery.

Four couples -- three married and one meeting for the first time -- drive from Tehran to a beachside villa for a weekend and are cavorting merrily when something goes terribly wrong and then something else. In confronting this second dilemma, the party learns that the woman who’d traveled with them to meet a potential new beau isn’t whom they thought she was, and a crisis of ethics looms almost as large as the life-and-death matter they face.

Powerfully acted, told with masterful indirection, and subtle in demonstrating the conflicts of contemporary life and religious stricture, it’s a genuinely gripping and revealing film.

You could be excused for thinking this was some sort of “Flight of the Conchords”-style put-on, since it purports to be a documentary about a pair of twin sisters, both lesbians, who have over the last couple of decades become one of the biggest country-music acts in all of New Zealand. And yet, it appears to be completely genuine.

Jools and Lynda Tropp veer between radical queer activism and vaudevillian silliness, with side trips to nuclear nonproliferation and pure sweet vocal harmonies. They never lose a sense of humor about the whole strange trip, although that light-heartedness is challenged during a battle against breast cancer.

It’s hard enough being a suburban Australian family, dealing with everything from head lice to figuring out where you can go on vacation when money’s tight. Throw the mother’s near-fatal aneurism into the mix, and the ordinary takes on new, deeper meanings. At least that’s Sarah Watt’s intent with this quirky comedy-drama, a follow-up to her more compelling first film “Look Both Ways,” a PIFF hit from a few years back.

The trouble here is the ham-fisted acting from much of the cast, including precocious children who border on shrill. Any time a film relies on reaction shots from a dog for laughs, you know it’s barking up the wrong tree.

This Canadian-made, Ireland-set film about a frightened, newly adopted boy’s attempts to win parental love, build self-confidence, and overcome stuttering is aimed primarily at young audiences, so it should not be judged purely by adult-oriented criteria. But we’re not so far removed from our own childhoods to reckon that most kids would be bored, annoyed and maybe depressed by this brand of cheese.

Relentlessly sentimental, self-consciously “Irish,” and marred by oppressive, almost non-stop pennywhistle music, “A Shine of Rainbows” is more than just a wee slog. And did I mention the (very fake) baby seal the Culkin-esque child continually visits? Sole saving grace: the spectacular scenery might have you checking your frequent-flyer miles.

Gianni di Grigorio, the screenwriter of last year’s acclaimed “Gomorrah,” makes his directing debut with “Mid-August Lunch,” and the two films couldn’t be more dissimilar. He also stars as Gianni, an unmarried middle-aged man who lives spartanly but congenially with his elderly mother. Things get a bit complicated when Gianni’s condo administrator dumps his mother and aunt in the small apartment for the night; when Gianni’s doctor does the same thing, the put-upon bachelor struggles to keep the quartet entertained and to meet their dietary restrictions.

It’s a gentle novella of a film, with a relaxed air and a running time abbreviated enough that when they all sit down for dinner at the movie’s close, you’re sad to see them all go.

Prison, we are sometimes told, makes professional criminals out of some amateurs, and this chillingly good film by director/co-writer Jacques Audiard (“The Beat That My Heart Skipped”) tracks that grim process with deftness, intelligence and fine craft.

Malik (Tahar Rahim) is a petty thief sent to a penitentiary where he’s bullied by both Corsican and Arabic gangs (he’s of mixed blood) and forced to commit a murder to stay alive. He becomes a lackey for a jailed Mafioso (Niels Arestrup), but uses that servitude as a means of schooling -- while simultaneously learning to read and write from a kindly Arab prisoner. Eventually, he puts these two strains of education together to become an unlikely man of his own.

Marvelously acted, rich in incident, and utterly convincing in its details, this Oscar-nominated film is sometimes grueling but always gripping.

The generations-long conflict between Israelis and Palestinians can be so complex that it can be difficult to understand on a human scale. This gripping web-of-life drama, a nominee for a Best Foreign Film Oscar, manages this difficult task by weaving together the stories of everyday people in the rough Ajami neighborhood of Jaffa: a young man forced to sell drugs to help his sick mother, a Jewish police officer grieving over the disappearance of his brother in the military, and a family whose fate is locked in a feud with a Bedouin clan.

Filmmakers Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani effectively show how, in a tinderbox fueled by racial and religious suspicions, quiet lives can be upended by mere chance. The film’s all the more remarkable because its actors are untrained and their lines are improvised. Clearly, they’ve lived this.

Director/co-writer Ursula Meier crafts a compelling (if not particularly subtle) micro-study of the effects of modern life on the family.

A husband (Olivier Gourmet), wife (Isabelle Huppert) and three kids enjoy a quiet, cuddly existence in a house by an empty, long-unfinished highway, which they use as their epic front yard. Then the government finishes that highway -- and within days, the intrusion of pollution, noise and gawking humanity inflicts every urban stress on the family at once, driving them wall-up-the-windows crazy.

"Home" is carried by strong performances that (mostly) make you sympathize with people completely unprepared for the inevitable, and Meier's clever frame compositions really make you feel the vehicular intrusion.

This barmy-cool "Eastern Western" pits a cowboy, a murderer, a train-robbing goofball, and various armies and bandit hordes against each other while chasing a treasure map across 1930s Manchuria.

The movie's a funny, fast-moving pastiche of Spielberg, Woo, Leone and George Miller, but it's a must-see for its three big action set pieces, which go on for a million years each and become almost hallucinatory. Did you really just watch a cowboy endlessly swing 100 feet above an open-air market on a rope, picking off bandits with a rifle? Did you really just watch 50 guys on trucks and horses blast each other to bits while chasing one guy on a motorcycle?

This ruthless, great-looking Czech World War II drama charts betrayals both national and marital.

After the Nazis roll into Prague, a radio personality (Marek Daniel) is forced to spew German propaganda to protect his Jewish wife (Jana Plodková). Meanwhile, the wife -- bored to tears after her movie-acting career is cut short by an anti-Semitic edict -- sneaks out of their apartment to flirt with a dashing, drug-abusing projectionist and engages in minor acts of artistic rebellion.

Longtime Boston Phoenix film critic Gerald Peary has gone where few of his ilk have ever dared by directing this documentary -- and it’s not necessarily a cheat that his subject is film criticism, particularly as the decline of the print version and the rise of its online siblings afford an opportune moment for storytelling, reflection and analysis.

Tracing the discipline of movie reviewing from its origins to the present day, with commentary by the likes of Andrew Sarris, Lisa Schwartzbaum and Harry Knowles, it’s a film that will be most loved, probably, by the folks it’s about (which is hardly a slam, as the same can be said for, oh, chick flicks and bromances). But its specificity isn’t a handicap, principally because the title tells the truth: this is a genuine labor of love.

(The Sunday screening will be followed by a panel discussion involving local film writers, including yours truly. Ahem.)

The newest film by veteran French director André Téchiné was inspired by a real-life hoax that exposed the prejudice of French authorities and media while casting doubt on actual hate crimes. But the movie is more than halfway through before the signature event takes place.

The buildup and aftermath involve more talking than action, and while much of the talk engages, it’s a problem that Jeanne (Emilie Dequenne), the dishonest young woman at the center of the furor, is immature, shallow and uninteresting.

The film can’t be easily dismissed — Téchiné’s craft is too solid, and some of the performances, particularly that of Catherine Deneuve as Jeanne’s incredulous mother, are excellent — but it’s a bit too circumspect in expressing its ideas.